Jacob Has Soft Blue Eyes
by Barry Eysman
Summary: Blindness and a will to see equal love in this small corner of The Twilight Zone


Jacob Has Soft Blue Eyes

By

Barry Eysman

Jacob's eyes were shiny blue. Everybody at school said his eyes were his most attractive features. Blue as a mountain stream. Blue as a summer sky. Kindly blue like meadowlark songs. Soft sweet songs of blue that made you happy just to look at them. Jacob has always been proud of his blue eyes, which made up for his somewhat stubby body and his average looking face. Jacob watched his eyes in the mirror at home every morning before school and every evening after school, before homework and supper. He was hardly a vain boy. He was sad a lot and shy and felt unworthy.

It was these very eyes that were betraying him. That had made him a person. That had taken his cowed cowlick black hair and his indifferent voice and his stance made by a person who knew he was to be harmed at any moment, some moment, maybe now, and entranced him into existing. For Jacob was going legally blind and he was despondent. His eyes were malformed inside, which was such a shabby joke; the eyes that made girls smile sweetly at him, not that he gave a fig about girls, for Jacob was 12 and would always be alone, but the sweet smiles he stored in his heart for the rainy days when he could no longer see them. Jacob was 12. And 12-year-old boys should not go legally blind.

He would be alone inside darkness and would see shadows at best. He had had all the surgeries there could safely be performed, and would think perform the others unsafely, but the doctors kind and skilled had at one time or another put their hands on Jacob's very spindly shoulders and had said no, Jacob, and there is still always life Jacob and had tried but Jacob remembered everything. The October leaves he stumble walked through now. The air so cold and friendly that it seemed visible as a gray stream rushing round him and Jacob loved books.

Oh he loved reading so and aimed to be a writer someday, to have a computer and to write his heart out. To dwell in a world of printed words and to see his words someday printed as well and not just as letters to the editor of his small town newspaper. Jacob was of course older than his years, and had this desire to see one more day, to see love come up and touch softly at him, to smile warm like a face that saw only his and his looking back, for Jacob, since he had cold parents, had never felt a kiss or a hug and had no knowledge of love save what he secretly felt.

And now all of him would be secret, for he knew by reading at the library, that a blind man's, or boy's, eyes were of no use. The would not look proper, for they could turn cross eyed or they could seem to look in opposite directions at once and he would have to wear dark glasses for then he would be hiding the only single illusion that he was alive and that he was seen by others as existing, for they could not see Jacob and Jacob was his eyes and there would be no more of him, and a Seeing Eye dog, and a school for the blind, and learning Braille. Oh he had tried to live with it. With the deterioration of these eyes, problems ping ponging back and forth with them, with the striations, with the volley ball sized, seemingly so, planets criss crossing his vision, and the colors getting all mixed up and the closing in of doors to blackness at the very edge of his vision one day last year. And he cried. They told him he would still be able to cry. He expected to do a great deal of that. His parents would never be through paying for when the insurance ran out and it had already done so. This they conveyed to him very strongly, like he was doing it on purpose.

They prodded and poked and burgled his eyes and his glasses lenses got thicker and thicker till his eyes looked like huge blue bleached tired baseballs through them and the kids no longer thought Jacob had soft blue eyes and girls weren't smiling at him now as the bandages came on and his absences to heal from operating room procedures and his constantly taking eye drops, a multitude of them every few minutes and having to sit there in school with those bottles of liquid and bottles of pills and a cup of water to take the pills with and sometimes Jacob wished he had a friend to say goodbye to him, for if no one says goodbye then there was only a genetic fluke of a lovely pair of blue eyes that his teachers said looked so deep and wise and they were mangled inside and torn and tortured and pulled and yanked and maneuvered and he looked at the sunless sky this afternoon as he walked so slowly and seemingly drunken from school, not waiting for his mother to pick him up.

He saw little moments of his life as his eyes behind those thick lenses, specially made, so thick they were, and everything was blurred, and he grappled the air and said oh please free me, oh please bend down to me and tell Joel he is my best friend in the whole world and I would take it as a matter of deep Autumn kindness if someone could tell him because I can't and it was a curly street and the day was dipping into Autumn darkness already, as he tripped over sidewalk cracks, but managed not to fall, managed to find home, and wondered if people were pitying him looking at him as they would look all his life and he was no judge of voices without being able to see the eyes too, as they already treated him as "special" and how he loathed that word, in school, and he was allowed to have a teacher or student help him from class to lunch to class and then to his mother's car at day's end.

The day smelled smoky and he wanted his eyes because he didn't want his other senses to be shaper in a kind of compassionate biological heave-ho. It was sacrilege not to be at home doing homework and saying tonight I will phone Joel and tonight a little moment of time he would hear and be heard by me-for he is the most important person in the world and I will not see him grow up and I will not see him run track like the proverbial wind and I will not stand gracelessly by him in the school hallway as he talked to girls for he was fine looking and had much more going for him than his eyes, and I will say Joel, let's go to the Dairy Barn tomorrow afternoon, have a soda, and let's be friends for I don't seem to want to be friends with anyone but you, what do you say?

And it would be about that point that Jacob of the soft broken blue eyes would take off his glasses at his desk in his room, put his pen down on his Blue Horse notebook, as he rubbed his sore eyes he had just doctored, eyes that were aching all the time from all those heroic attempts at saving them, and his eyes would go bleak as Dickens' Bleak House, and his mind would get as lost in himself and the quickening dark world in which he was already being heavily thrust, as though in a Kafka nightmare, asking my crime? Could someone tell me past these high desks and people in corpus stasis and this blizzard of useless documents and papers, could someone please, you for instance, Josef K., tell me my crime and yours, please if you know for I am to lose my vision and it grieves me terribly.

All, he thought, I wanted to do was have a soda with my best friend in the world, the popular, goldenly handsome, wildly successful already with the girls, smartest boy in school, all the living hell I wanted was to have a soda with my friend at the Dairy Barn, and other kids could see the eye hole freak, sometimes with bandages under his glasses and sunglasses like The Invisible Man has someone there of great importance with him, right next to him, not afraid of catching blind germs or being tainted in some improbably odd way and we would sit there on those red leather seats and he would sip vanilla and I would sip strawberry and we'd laugh like kids laugh when it's October and Halloween is knocking on your heart. He would not notice the dark glasses hiding what I used to be, for he would not care about that. The journey for him would be made in an instant; he would not fade on me or let me fade on him and I would see him up close and his features, including the little mole just above his chin a bit to the right and he would smile his pale smile at me and though the rest of forever would be dark for me, he would by my light to see by.

Jacob put his thick glasses on again, pretended he could read his homework assignment the teacher had written especially large lettered for him, had even included computer enlarged copies of the pages of the text books she and he pretended he could see even in the strong light by his desk, when he could see only shadows and one day would be a shadow, and he was everywhere at once—on his way home in Autumn or summer and in front of his Christmas tree last year and the year before when his craving for books brought him small slender treasures he held and read endlessly over and over. He was in the town library. The school library. He was on the phone telling Joel, sorry, not tonight, girl coming over, too bad so sad. And he was a boy in a small house that creaked at night when it was windy and he had always been scared of the dark, so he would have to get ready to be constantly frightened from hereon out. Then there were the other eyeless eye disasters he had to look forward to, for going legally blind—let me go illegally blind he thought, let me stop being the good kid all the time, in this at least, something for God's sake—though no one told him what they were for he had enough problems.

So when the phone rang at eight twenty two p.m. that night he was finishing his homework, he knew immediately who it was, and Jacob was prepared to say to the racer of the wind, I would be happy to go have a soda tomorrow afternoon with you, Joel, and could you help me, hold my arm, it's long past gotten to that stage, I fear, but no matter, Joel could you lead me to the center table there and tell me how the faces of your friends boys and girls are looking at you and at me, and yes it is tough being in this situation but there are others in much tougher ones, and my eyes really don't look like deep peach pits sunk into my other wise fathomable face of no repute, but are still blue like the ocean and we could go to the ocean sometime and Jacob's mother answered the phone as from a distant place where blue eyes born screwed inside hopelessly and a device known as Jacob had not been invented yet and time was a curious not recorded device at the moment, she said, yes the bridge club meets at Ms. Newman's on Friday, and I'll bring the chiffon cake, and you are scheduled to bring that wonderful home made stew you make so wonderfully, and..and..

Somewhere around there was when for Jacob Shirley reality went blind and the Dairy Barn was where he was, sitting beside Joel, his friend, and Joel was saying he thought Jacob would never ever notice him, that for all those years of school, Joel had wanted to say hi, to introduce himself, as Jacob smiled easily and comfortingly at Joel and said time has its way doesn't it? And sighing inwardly, sipping his soda, they talked of Autumn parties Joel had gone to, hoping to find Jacob there and always disappointed, and please come watch me run track, Jacob Shirley, would you please, while Jacob took off his thick glasses and the sunglasses he had taken to wearing, darker than midnight, exposing his empty peach pit dug in deep dark holes and said but Joel, I can't see you. And Joel said I will light up the world for you; I will make the sun shine forever for us and we will be happy together, I will read books to you and tell you what happens in movies to which you can hear only the sound and see only flickering shadow shows.

And then Joel said the most wonderful, the most incredible, and the scariest thing to Jacob who had thought of it long and long for a number of years. Jacob, Joel said, take my hand and accept my world in place of this one; give up it all and your eyes will always be soft blue to me and I will play their melodies forever more, will you please do that? Will you give up everything for me and let me walk with you through all your days the rest of our lives? As Joel put his hands slowly to Jacob's head and leaned it to Joel's chest, so Jacob heard his heart and Jacob knew then in a world peopled with blindness, he was the trumpeter swan who took hold of Icarus and together they would fly through all the cold autumn days and into the wonderful country of December and icicles and oh such white white snow, and later that night, as Jacob lay in his bed scared of the dark, not opening his eyes for it would do no good, he said to Joel, yes, Joel, yes, I will do this thing for I need a friend and I want it to be you and I give my life my world my soul away to you for my soft blue eyes to see your brown big wise eyes and see your smile and your mole a bit above your chin. I trust you.

And Jacob slept. And his soft blue eyes went elsewhere and he and Joel followed. It was the very last night of Jacob Shirley, and he was content and happy as he watched the wind named Joel run through the apple Autumn orchards and to the top of brown hills, and Jacob came happily after. There was child laughter. And Jacob so surprised at how good it was to laugh, to hear it, and to hear it mingled with Joel's, and have that golden light of home, always beside him or just up ahead, and a hand reaching to Jacob's, so Jacob of soft blue eyes, no glasses, no eye patches or bandages, no eye drops or pill bottles, Jacob would never fall down again. The lights Joel created were so soft and so wildly different and otherly and filled with tender longing-fulfilled music and such pure and bravely conceived happiness, that both boys forget what had been beauty to others, somewhere a long useless time ago. Then they turned their backs on everything but themselves, and together ran away.

And it was so.


End file.
